Comments on: Lucus a non lucendo

By: Steve Reuland

Steve Reuland — Sun, 11 Apr 2004 07:26:00 +0000

Daniel writes: And the fact that the simple existence of a sex drive is next to useless in explaining any specific human sexual behaviour has been known since very shortly after Freud. It’s the same with all our broad drives. I would say that Ev Psy explains a lot more than the simple existence of a sex drive. It explains, for example, why men tend to be attracted to younger women but women tend to be attracted to older men. It explains why men moreso than women tend to be concerned with phyical attractiveness in a potential mate. It explains why there is a strong taboo against incest in basically every culture you come across. It explains why polygyny is much more common than polyandry (which is next to nonexistent). And so on. I think it explains quite a bit, just so long as we realize that it explains tendencies and not specifics. And that the thing about tendencies is that they're statistical, and that one can always find some exceptions. One place where self-styled evolutionary psychologists really get themselves into trouble is in trying to explain abnormal psychology. The truly horrid "sad hominid" explanation given by Daniel above is one such example. I think people fall into this trap because they're used to thinking in terms of adaptiveness, and so they come up with adaptive explanations for things which clearly are nonadaptive. It's much better to view abnormal psychology as, well, abnormal, and to realize that the human mind is far from perfect, so that enough negative stimuli can throw it pretty far off kilter.

By: Steve Reuland

Steve Reuland — Sun, 11 Apr 2004 07:00:57 +0000

On a more general note, while I’m the first to agree that there are a number of problems with Ev Psy, I don’t think the case is helped much by flogging strawmen. First and foremost is the false dichotomy of “nature vs. nurture”. This is something that both sides are guilty of, and there’s a fair amount of it present on this thread. Organisms exist as a complex interplay between their genes and their environment, and there is no meaningful way to fully separate the two. The way in which either acts as an influence is itself heavily influenced by the other. The simple fact is that there is no human trait that is not influenced in some degree by the environment. Likewise, there is also no human trait that cannot be traced back to the influence of genes. But neither one, in isolation, can fully explain any trait. The problem comes when people on either side of the fence think that they can disprove or downplay the influence of one by pointing to evidence for the influence of the other. And because that’s trivial, it’s easy for detractors of Ev Psy to believe that genes are irrelevant, or for proponents to think that genes are everything. As far as Ev Psy is concerned, what matters it that there exists, at some level, genetic variation that is correlated to behavioral tendancies. I think that’s a fairly noncontroversial proposition in general, though in some (many?) specific cases it’s probably arguable. Note that it doesn’t matter if the effects of the genotype are highly indirect or mediated through environmental cues. So again, pointing out that a given trait will fail to develop in the absence of the proper environmental stimuli is irrelevant. Said trait would probably also fail to develop in the absence of oxygen, but we wouldn’t argue that this indicates that the trait is not genetically influenced, and thus invisible to selection.

By: Steve Reuland

Steve Reuland — Sun, 11 Apr 2004 06:26:17 +0000

“To say, for example, that female preference for a wealthy mate is an adaptation implies that: 1. Female preference for a wealthy mate is genetically encoded, i.e., implemented in the realm of nucleic acids and proteins.” Not exactly. First of all, the selectable trait doesn’t need to be quite that specific. It’s far more likely that a more generalized behavioral tendancy—like “be attracted to high-status males”—is what’s adaptive. And it will continue to be adaptive insofar as wealth is correlated with high status. Secondly, there is no need for the specific trait to be encoded in a specific set of genes. Any combination of genes and environment that leads to the behavioral tendancy is enough to make it selectable. All that matters is that it is heritable in some fashion, no matter how indirect. “2. There are at least two alleles for “female mate wealth preference”, corresponding to more and less (or presence and absence) of this trait.” I have no idea where this comes from. It makes no difference if the genetic influence is due to a single allele, multiple alleles, a single locus, multiple loci, regulatory elements, or any combination thereof. Perhaps you mean that there must be some variation within the population in order to be selectable. That’s true (or at least it would have to have been true in the past), but that’s a far cry from requiring the trait to be monogenic and diallelic.

By: Bill

Bill — Sat, 10 Apr 2004 02:24:40 +0000

pete writes “Since no one in the world today has the faintest idea of: a. how preference for a wealthy mate could be genetically encoded; b. how any behavior is genetically encoded; c. what different alleles for these genes would look like; d. how greatly the various alleles would differ in fitness?since, in other words, evolutionary psychology operates in a sphere completely untroubled by the constraints of actual mechanism, I find it hard to see it as anything more than ‘infotainment.’ The more we learn about developmental biology, the more we realize that the path from genotype to phenotype can be fiendishly devious. The air of certainty with which many EP proponents give their vaporings is ludicrous.” No one has any better idea how bees are born wired to navigate as they do, yet much is known with certainty about the ways in which they are. Arguments against complicated behavior wired into humans which are so general that they don’t distinguish between humans and bees, proudly declaimed without mentioning counterexamples like bees where pretty clearly the arguments must be invalid somehow, seem pretty ludicrous to me. Also, when would you say we reached a useful understanding of the mechanism of evolution of non-mental, non-psychological, ordinary biological things like stomachs and blood cells and seeds and disease resistance? Watson and Crick? The slightly earlier experimenters who showed that inheritance followed nucleic acids, not proteins? Would you say that any confident conclusion made between around 1880 and 1940 regarding the evolution of ordinary non-psychological traits was necessarily ludicrous? How do you feel about the US political battles in against teaching of evolution in that period? Do you believe that the study of the evolution of the nervous system should be held to a completely different standard than the study of the evolution of more mechanically or chemically obvious traits? Why? None of this is to be taken as blanket defense of everyone who puts pen to paper to make claims about evolution of psychological traits. Even very smart and knowledgeable people sometimes end up with stupid ideas. But that was true of early evolutionists studying and popularizing the evolution of grosser traits as well. While in hindsight (or even, sometimes, in the considered judgment of their contemporaries) they obviously went astray in various ways, still the better ones look like they were much closer to the truth than any of those of their critics who used emotionally charged and less than rigorous arguments to condemn the whole enterprise as ludicrous.

By: David B

David B — Fri, 09 Apr 2004 12:35:15 +0000

Pots, kettles, glass houses… Sure, some evo-psych (possibly the majority) is bad science. But anyone who casts stones at evo-psych (on grounds of scientific methodology) while admiring (take your pick) Freud, Structuralist anthropology, Marxist sociology (or for that matter most other sociology), simply has no shame.

By: Warren

Warren — Fri, 09 Apr 2004 05:24:19 +0000

At least some of the ideas behind EP are true: The evolution of thinking and language helped survivability and were preserved traits. Likewise with sexuality, the emotional trait of getting angry when hurt and the very existance of memory and short-term memory. A whole bunch of very fundamental things. Probably including negative reactions to bitter tastes and certain smells. So it makes sense to see how far these ideas can be pushed, how much can be proved somehow. Traits that are expensive will not be preserved unless they confer some reproductive advantage. The ability of African blood cells to repel malaria by forming a sickle shape comes to mind as a biological example. Having legs is another. So expensive behaviors that are preserved across cultures and time are good candidates for having a genetic origin. Possible candidates include pair-bonding, our protective attitude toward babies, being attracted to fertile, healthy potential mates, particular facial expressions, an attraction to living near bodies of water, hatred of insects, fear of heights, fear of death. You can make your own list. Genetic inheritence should be less useful in explaining behaviors with (apparent) negative reproductive/survival value, such as suicide, homosexuality, neuroses and psychoses. So it makes sense to look for alternative materialist explanations for these behaviors. These behaviors with (apparently) negative survival value may be the result of imperfections inherent in the genetic system. Mutations, transcription errors and so forth might be involved. Alternatively, one might look for a reproductive/survival value for these apparently negative behaviors. It’s at least an intelligent question, as these behaviors are expensive and preserved across time and culture. Evolutionary Psychology is a legitimate area of research, and if it is very hard to to verify hypotheses with experiment or scientific measurement, then it might help to throw around the ideas a whole lot until somebody comes up with ways of verifying or disproving the validity of individual ideas. This is should be worthwhile because we know that at least some neurological, and hence behavioral patterns, are genetically encoded.

By: Warren

Warren — Fri, 09 Apr 2004 04:49:40 +0000

At least some of the ideas behind EP are true: The evolution of thinking and language helped survivability and were preserved traits. Likewise with sexuality, the emotional trait of getting angry when hurt and the very existance of memory and short-term memory. A whole bunch of very fundamental things. Probably including an inherited hatred of the smell of feces. So it makes sense to see how far these ideas can be pushed, how much can be proved somehow. In practical terms, evolutionary psychology will become less important as neurological knowledge increases. Traits that expensive will not be preserved unless they confer some reproductive advantage. The ability of African blood cells to repel malaria by forming a sickle shape comes to mind as a biological example. Having legs is another. So expensive behaviors that are preserved across cultures and time are good candidates for having a genetic origin. Possible candidates include pair-bonding, our protective attitude toward babies, being attracted to fertile, healthy potential mates, particular facial expressions, an attraction to living near bodies of water, hatred of insects, fear of heights, fear of death. You can make your own list. Genetic inheritence will be less useful in explaining behaviors with (apparent) negative reproductive/survival value, such as suicide, homosexuality, neuroses and psychoses. So it makes sense to look for alternative materialist explanation for these behaviors. Many have been offered, none have been proved. These behaviors with (apparently) negative survival value may be the result of imperfections inherent in the genetic system. Mutations, transcription errors and so forth might be involved. Alternatively, one might look for a reproductive/survival value for these apparently negative behaviors. It’s at least an intelligent question, as these behaviors are expensive and preserved across time and culture. Proving things is much harder, of course.

By: Pete

Pete — Thu, 08 Apr 2004 23:08:49 +0000

To say, for example, that female preference for a wealthy mate is an adaptation implies that: 1. Female preference for a wealthy mate is genetically encoded, i.e., implemented in the realm of nucleic acids and proteins. 2. There are at least two alleles for “female mate wealth preference”, corresponding to more and less (or presence and absence) of this trait. Since no one in the world today has the faintest idea of: a. how preference for a wealthy mate could be genetically encoded; b. how any behavior is genetically encoded; c. what different alleles for these genes would look like; d. how greatly the various alleles would differ in fitness—since, in other words, evolutionary psychology operates in a sphere completely untroubled by the constraints of actual mechanism, I find it hard to see it as anything more than “infotainment.” The more we learn about developmental biology, the more we realize that the path from genotype to phenotype can be fiendishly devious. The air of certainty with which many EP proponents give their vaporings is ludicrous.

By: john c. halasz

john c. halasz — Thu, 08 Apr 2004 21:08:40 +0000

That part needed irony tags.

By: dsquared

dsquared — Thu, 08 Apr 2004 20:41:04 +0000

Not sure about Sartre, but I’m fairly sure I remember Lacan making several references to biology in the short anthologised extract I read. Something about the sexual development of pigeons. I remember it because I remember thinking that it sounded like crap, but there you go.

By: john c. halasz

john c. halasz — Thu, 08 Apr 2004 18:38:58 +0000

“Nobody since Freud has argued that human behavior is ‘unrelated to biology’ or at least nobody who is not a fictional construct”- such as Sartre or Lacan? Well, I’m not near as learned as many here, but I’ll offer my $.02 worth. I seems to me that genetically retained behavioral selection applies primarily to instincts. Instincts are neural programs that set off a fixed chain of behaviors given the relevant trigger stimulus. If I recall rightly from ancient reading of Konrad Lorenz, he said that, as neural complexity increases, fixed chains tend to break down and their component behaviors tend to gain an independent drive toward expression. The exampled he cited was house cats. Now it seems to me that as neural complexity increases, animals would tend to acquire an increasing capacity for behavioral learning relatively unchained from fixed instincts based on the implicit grasp of behavioral rules rather than causally fixed processes. But then would not this capacity tend to co-evolve with instinctual endowments, such that those instinctual endowments become inter-nested with requirements for rule-governed behavioral learning, such that the operations of instincts come to depend upon such learning? My speculation would not be at all clear as to the specific selection pressures that would trigger such a line of development, but its specific adaptive advantages would seem obvious. As for the evolution of “mind”, by which we actually mean the evolution of the brain as an organ with complex interactions between physiological and mental functionnings, it would seem to me that the role of specific, genetically fixed selections would tend to decrease with increases in size/capacity; in other words, that a nonspecific increase in superfluous neural capacity would effectively find its “uses” without being pre-programmed. With respect to human evolution, the growth in brain size is a contingent outcome of bipedalism, which apparently is now being pushed back to 3 to 4 million years ago. The resulting narrowing of the birth canal required neotenic or premature birth to allow the infant’s head to get through without being crushed, which means that embryological rates of growth continue for some time after birth. This, in turn, allowed for further neotenic mutations to extend the term of such embryological growth, leading to increased brain size. Presumably, the increased dependency of the infant and thus the increased dependency of nursing and tending mothers created selection pressures for a further intensification of sociality. (The peculiar evolution of human sexuality, with its year-round estrus, may have evolved so as to increase attachment to the dependent mother-infant dual unit, resulting in the paradoxical configuration that human beings are at once excessively horny and excessively prone to attachment.) Have y’all heard of the woman who teaches parrots to talk? No, not imitate sounds, but use such sounds contextually and indicatively, very much as efforts to teach great apes sign language have yielded some significant results. The woman’s legit, a professor of psychology I think in the U.of Cal. system, and she’s been at it for about 30 years, with a few generations of parrots. Now parrots are birds and they don’t call ‘em “bird-brains” for nothing, though parrots as a genus have the largest relative brain sizes among birds. But still, they lack mammalian brain structures. I would think such results suggest something of the “plasticity” of neural matter. And as for phonemic pattern recognition capacities, there is a case at the Yerkes Lab of a bonobo, who was raised while its mother was undergoing language training experiments, who shows considerable evidence of such speech recognition. Surely it is way too Aristotelian of me to think this, but, if the terms of supposed explanations of human behavior do not accord with anything that we experience of the complexion of human behavior, I would think that prima facie grounds for finding them dubious. Perhaps rather than ev psych, relying on speculative hypotheses about what happened way long ago, there should develop a scientific research program for human ethology, taking human behavior as it actually is and considering it in terms of the interpenetration of neuro-biology and culture.

By: dsquared

dsquared — Thu, 08 Apr 2004 15:48:31 +0000

Mike, you’re presenting a quite controversial area here (language acquisition) as if it were settled science. By no means everyone agrees that phoneme recognition can’t be retrained. And the evidence for modularity from spatial organisation of the brain only exists for very general ur-behaviours if it exists at all (much more general modules, for example, than anything on Pinker’s list linked above). Everything we know from head trauma cases suggests that the most extraordinary things can be relearnt even after massive damage to the physical substrate.

By: Mike Huben

Mike Huben — Thu, 08 Apr 2004 13:50:28 +0000

Developmental biology also supports plenty of examples where neural plasticity does NOT work: for example, language aquisition (especially phoneme recognition, where you have a brief window of opportunity to train.) The example of “adapting” visual cortex to braille recognition is interesting, but I wonder if the possibility of normal (perhaps minor) use of tactile recognition is also handled at least in part by the visual cortex. If so, then the plasticity is not as dramatic, not a “water into wine” conversion.

By: Mike Huben

Mike Huben — Thu, 08 Apr 2004 13:35:30 +0000

Lewontin is right about EP misrepresentations of genetic cause the same way he’d be right criticizing “scientific” misrepresentations of mutation from comic books. I haven’t read “Triple Helix”, but it sounds to me as if Lumsden and Wilson covered much the same ground for sociobiology in “Genes, Mind, and Culture” in 1981. I disagree with dsquared’s claim that the mind isn’t modular: there’s plenty of evidence of modules from physical organization of the brain and from genetic deficets. Dsquared also misrepresents genes for walking as ““having legs and a brain” because untrained humans scamper. However, no other apes can really be trained to walk as their “natural” posture: their backs and pelvises are not adapted for it. Nor can they be trained to speak (they don’t have proper equipment) nor can they be trained in full human grammar for signing (and I believe I have read of humans with genetic grammar deficets) and I doubt they can be trained to recognize one of the normal sets of human phonemes.

By: dsquared

dsquared — Thu, 08 Apr 2004 13:26:38 +0000

Shai: There are a number of items on that list which are regarded by developmental psychologists as simply false. Basically everything on the “innate abilities” list is more or less settled to be learned behaviour. (interesting link. Of the “Innate Social Behaviours”, many of them are developmental stages identified by Piaget. Note also that whoever wrote the list couldn’t resist sneaking “Variation in intelligence (leading to inequalities)” onto it; the conflation of extremely arguable biology with extremely unlikely economic theory is classic Pinker.